Luxury is such a common term for swimming pools that it has almost become meaningless. Every builder offers it, making it hard for homeowners to tell what separates a truly custom, luxurious build from an ordinary pool with an enhanced marketing approach.
It is more effective to judge a luxury pool based on the areas where the two differ: materials used, amenities provided, integration of the pool into the surroundings, and design finishes. Evaluating builders in these areas, rather than relying on the term "luxury," provides more insight. This isn't exclusive to the pool industry. Still, it's especially costly here because the gap between a proposal that sounds like a premium project and the actual build often doesn't become apparent until the project is already well into construction.
Materials are Where the Luxury Pool Build Starts to Look Different
Pool construction usually uses affordable, readily available materials, such as basic plaster surfaces, standard concrete decks, and simple coping details. Custom pool construction uses higher-quality natural stone and tile finishes throughout the pool and its surrounds, carefully selected for performance and aging quality rather than cost alone.
This is reflected in how homeowners can perceive these features: the surface texture of the deck, the look of the tile line at the water level, and the uniform appearance of the stone material around the pool.
Spa Amenities That Go Beyond a Bolt-On Add-On
While the regular pool may have a spa included as a secondary feature without many facilities like heating, the luxury custom-built pool considers the inclusion of spa facilities as an integral part of the total design instead of being simply a secondary add-on to the existing pool design, with additional features such as sun shelves in shallow water.
What makes the two pools different is not only the inclusion of a spa facility, but how the whole thing has been incorporated into the pool's design.
In this way, it also affects how people use the spa in practice. A spa placed in an ignored corner of the pool is less likely to be used frequently than one that feels like an organic addition to the main activity areas, because it never becomes part of the space's practical use. This is why the placement of the spa in connection with other design elements matters.
Outdoor Living and Entertainment Designed to Center on the Pool
Luxury pool design isn't limited to the pool itself; it also includes the space that supports entertaining and other outdoor living functions. This usually involves an outdoor kitchen designed so the pool remains central to entertaining, and gatherings aren't drawn to another area of the yard.
Regular pool construction, by contrast, tends to focus only on the pool itself, while outdoor living facilities, such as the kitchen, remain an afterthought.
Landscape and Lighting Planned Into the Same Design
Custom vs. standard builds also show up in how the landscape and lighting are treated. Instead of treating plantings and lighting as the final step after everything else is done, a truly customized build integrates them into the same process as the rest of the pool and hardscaping, with automation built in as well, rather than treating them as separate.
Some common components of this integrated design include:
- Landscape design that takes place along with the overall design of the pool, rather than being designed to fit around the pool
- Lights that take into account the aesthetic of the pool at night time, as well as its safety, as opposed to just one or the other
- Automation that allows all the systems to be controlled from one single system
This is typically the biggest giveaway for whether a build is customized.
Turning Luxury Pool Ideas Into Questions Worth Asking a Builder
Homeowners looking for luxury pool ideas may be better off asking a contractor directly about each point above, rather than relying on the term "luxury" in a proposal. The questions about the actual materials for the deck and finish, whether the spa or sun shelf is a built-in feature or an additional structure, whether there is a place in the outdoor living concept for a kitchen or entertainment area, and whether the landscaping and lighting are included in the initial stage of design will clearly differentiate the high-end from the standard one.
Contractors who work at the true high-end level have answers to all these questions ready at hand because they include all of these issues in every project they undertake as a matter of course. The luxury pools that Field of Dreams builds are structured around these four types: high-end building materials, spa features, living and entertainment space, and landscaping and lighting done in tandem, in Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania.
Sign in to leave a comment.